- [Narrator] Funding for this program was provided by, - [Speaker] Chattanooga Funeral Home Crematory and Florist.

Dedicated to helping you celebrate your life or the life of a loved one for over 85 years.

Chattanooga Funeral Home believes that each funeral should be as unique and memorable as the life being honored.

- [Narrator] This program is also made possible by support from viewers like you.

Thank you.

- This week on the A List, we'll get to know an artist who is making an impact worldwide with his thought provoking work.

- I remember, at a certain point, standing back and watching, you know, again, people interact with this work and realizing in that moment, this is what art is.

This is what I want to do.

I don't wanna just make pretty pictures.

I wanna make art that means something in the world.

That can impact people, that could change lives.

And that's you know, that's how I got here.

- Join me as I talk with Dr. Fahamu Pecou.

Coming up next on the A List.

(upbeat music) Dr. Fahamu Pecou is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar.

Through paintings, performance art, and academic work, he merges the fine art world with hip hop culture.

Creating bright and bold pieces that confront contemporary representations of black masculinity.

His work has been featured in museums and galleries around the world.

And Fahamu has become a widely discussed young creator in the contemporary art space.

Fahamu recently spoke at the Hunter Museum of American Art, which now permanently houses his painting, Monsters and Saints.

- Like the way those kinds of things inform and impact how we develop and how we grow.

- Fahamu welcome to the A List.

- Thank you so much, thank you for having me.

- And welcome to the Hunter Museum and to Chatanooga and we're thrilled to have you here.

And we're even more thrilled to have you permanently here as part of a piece that the Hunter has acquired.

And I'm very excited that we get to go to the piece and talk about that a little bit later.

But for now, tell me about the work that you do and the impact that you hope to make.

- Sure, in my work I'm confronting stereotypes and misrepresentations of black male masculinity.

Trying to reframe or rewrite narratives around black identities.

I use myself as a subject in the work to put on and transform these stereotypes.

So in a sense I'm kind of exploding the stereotypes from the inside out.

And ultimately trying to present portraits of black masculinity that humanizes us in ways that conventional representations have not.

- Now, when you first started as an artist, not to misquote you.

But I understand you originally wanted to be the Black Walt Disney.

- That's correct.

- So this is a little different.

(both laughing) Tell me about sort of the beginning stages of your art journey and how that has really transformed into where you are now.

- Sure.

So yeah, I've been drawing and making art since since I could hold a pencil.

And very early on you know, I used to watch like cartoons like Bugs Bunny and Fred Flintstone and I would try to draw the cartoon too.

Back then the cartoons were a lot less sophisticated.

So you know, Fred Flintstone would be standing very still and just his mouth would be moving.

And I would try to draw them really quick before they moved again.

But ultimately you know, I knew that I wanted to be an artist.

I didn't quite know what that meant.

People would often say things like you know, artists never make money until they die, or you'll be a starving artist or something like that.

And so with that in mind, I was like trying to figure out how I could be an artists and still make money.

When I was about nine years old, we read something in school about Charles Schulz and it mentioned that he was an animator.

And that day I ran home, we had this set of encyclopedias from 1969 in my house.

And I you know, pulled out the A encyclopedia.

I looked up animator and said, look up see cartoonists.

So I got to see, I looked up cartoonists, I read everything it said about cartooning.

And it said in this 1969 edition that a cartoonist could make up to $1,000 a week.

I was like, hmm, carry the one.

(both laughing) They must be making a lot more money now, I'm going to do that.

And so from that time from about the age of nine, until I got to undergrad, everything that I did was to be a cartoon animator.

By middle school, I had started my own business.

It was called Moo Tunes.

And I had about six or seven different comic book titles that I would write and illustrate every night and then rush to school in the morning, Xerox them in the library and then sell 'em to my friends for like 50 cents in you know, during lunch.

And you know, I just was really, really like focused and intentional about you know, being this artist.

But when I got to the Atlanta College of Art, I was introduced to the fine arts.

Before that time you know, I was in a small town in South Carolina.

There were no galleries or museums for me to go to.

So I didn't have any experience or relationship to like painting and sculpture.

But when I got to Atlanta, my college was on the same campus as the High Museum of Art.

And I became introduced as I said, to like the fine arts and changed my trajectory.

I realized that there was so much more to art than what I had previously known.

And it opened me up to opportunities and experiences that were beyond my imagination.

- Did you feel like you had a body of support at college?

That you had people who were mentoring you?

You had peers who were supporting your vision, or did you feel sort of like on an island of your own?

- There were you know, certainly peaks and valleys in that journey.

Very early on I did not feel very much supported, but ultimately I found a great peer group.

The population of Black people at Atlanta College of Art was not that huge.

There was only one Black professor on the faculty.

But you know, amongst my friends, we, you know, sort of had our own like school outside of school you know.

Where we would challenge each other with you know, various books that we were reading and conversations and even artists that we were looking at.

'Cause oftentimes those artists weren't taught in our classes.

Ultimately I ended up taking painting classes at Spelman College with Dr. Arturo Lindsay.

And that really changed the trajectory of not only being able to see someone who looked like me, who's actually a practicing artist and also a professor and scholar, but also just the way Arturo challenged me to think about what art is and what art could do.

You know, again, everything that I was doing before was about making cartoons and you know, telling those types of stories.

But I didn't really think about the broader implications of art and how art connects us as human beings to one another.

So Arturo's urging and pushing and challenging, you know, really helped me grow as an artist.

(hip hop music) - That introduction to the fine art space certainly opened up a world of possibilities for Fahamu's work.

His early cartoons were transformed by paint and canvas and he began exploring fascinations like African art and masks that can still be found in his work today.

But it wasn't until he used his art as a way to open up about his own past, that Fahamu saw the power of art to create transformative human connection.

So when did you finally figure out your true path?

That it was not just painting right?

That that was really an on-ramp to so many more artistic opportunities for you in ways to not just create art, but to create a narrative.

- Sure.

So when I was four years old, I lost my mom.

She was murdered by my father who was schizophrenic.

And this traumatic experience was really sort of the catalyst for a lot of trauma in other areas of my life that was never dealt with.

I never had therapy or any of that kind of stuff like that growing up.

And when I was a junior in college, I heard the song called Guess Who?

By a group called Goody Mob.

In the song each of the guys talks about the impact that their mother's love had on them.

Listening to that song, I was really moved, you know, by the lyrics.

In fact, while listening to it, I created this piece that was a homage to my mother while listening to that song.

And it just kind of sat in a corner in my dorm room.

Over time you know, my friends who would come by would see this piece and they'd be like, what is that?

You know, what is that about?

You know, people were really like drawn to it.

And again, I'd never talked about that experience.

I never shared it with my friends or anything like that.

But suddenly I was compelled to tell the story about what happened the night my mom died, and using my art you know, as a way to do it.

I couldn't really explain why I was doing it, I just felt compelled to do it.

And so my entire senior exhibition was this installation that recounted the night that my mom died from the perspective of me and my siblings.

And I transformed the gallery into the brownstone apartment that we lived in in Brooklyn at the time.

The night of the opening, you know, many people from the public and from my school came to the exhibition.

And you know, just watching people interact with the work, you know, people read the stories or read the perspectives, looked at the images, people were in tears, crying.

A few people came up to me would share things like hey, you know, I haven't spoken to my brother in 15 years because we had an argument about X, Y, and Z, but your work makes me wanna reach back out to them.

Or I was abused as a child and your work gives me the courage to confront you know, that abuse.

And I remember at a certain point standing back and watching, you know, again, people interact with this work and realizing in that moment, this is what art is.

This is what I want to do.

I don't wanna just make pretty pictures, I wanna make art that means something in the world.

That can impact people.

That could change lives.

And that's you know, that's how I got here.

- So how did you form this connection with that goal and the hip hop world?

- So that actually kind of just happened as a result of living and you know, moving through life.

After I graduated from Atlanta College of Art, I needed a job.

Painter is not a job that you can apply for.

And I ended up lying on an application and said, I knew how to do graphic design.

I'd never done any graphic design in my life, but I knew how to use a computer a little bit.

And at this time I was living back in New York and I got this job working at a boutique graphic design agency that did a lot of collateral for hip hop artists and nightclubs and restaurants, etcetera.

And very quickly, you know, I began sitting with like up and coming hip hop stars from the late 90s and designing album covers for them and designing promotional material for them.

And I remember at one point thinking, you know... 'Cause I was really fascinated by the fact that some of these artists were people that I was familiar with from their music videos and stuff like that.

But they were nothing like the character that they played on TV and I was just really fascinated by that.

And I remember thinking to myself, I wonder what would happen if somebody marketed a visual artist the same way we do a hip hop artist and what people respond the same way?

And I just kind of filed that away in the back of my mind.

I continued to you know, do my work as a graphic designer, ultimately moving back to Atlanta and starting my own creative agency doing similar type of work.

But at one point I just became so frustrated with trying to get my work into galleries that I decided to take that idea that I had about the hip hop marketing piece and apply it to myself.

And so I started marketing myself in my artwork as if I was a rap star and it just kind of really took off.

Like people immediately began to respond to it.

I was making T-shirts and stickers and people were hitting me up for you know, to get the shirts or stickers.

- I've seen the shirts.

And I was hoping to get one by the way.

(both laughing) - I often take credit for being the first person to start a social media marketing campaign.

And so I started using like sites like MySpace and creating these like fake profile pages and you know, having these fake pages to be like, have you seen that new Fahamu painting?

And you know, just like pushing it out there and like really trying to create a lot of buzz.

But ultimately it was this idea of gorilla marketing that we often find in hip hop that became sort of catalyst for me to get my workout into the world.

- So this happens and how do you translate that into I don't wanna say real art, but art that's gonna pay the bill and not just lying on the resume without the graphic artist?

Which is also I mean, you gotta sometimes we do what we gotta do.

- Yeah, yeah.

Well, I would say the big shift came around 2005 when I was a student in Arturo's class.

He used to always say to me, there's no such thing as luck.

You have to be prepared when your opportunities come.

I used to hate when he said that 'cause he said it a lot, and it didn't really like register to me.

It didn't really like make a lot of sense, like whatever, you know.

But there was an event in Atlanta in spring of 2005, it was like a group art show.

And I was invited to be a part of that group show.

But a few days before the event was to happen, the organizers realized they had invited too many artists.

And so they had to go through and start cutting people out.

I was one of the people who got that call like yeah, you can't be in the show.

But at that point I had already bought materials and you know, spent money on creating this work.

And so had like some little bit of static with the organizers but ultimately they relented and they let me you know, be in the show.

But by that point I was so frustrated and annoyed.

I was like, not only am I gonna be in this show, I'm gonna take over (both laughing).

So I ended up contacting as many people as I could to get them to wear my T-shirts and you know, kind of make a mob scene.

I even hired a private bodyguard and I got-- - No, you did not.

- I did.

And I got one of my girlfriends to be my date for the evening.

We showed up.

The event was at the High Museum.

We showed up that night there was a line out the door and down the sidewalk.

And we pulled up in a town car.

My bodyguard gets out and he opens the door and you know, we got sunglasses on, and it's eight o'clock at night so it's dark.

We're walking up the line and we're skipping the entire line.

Like my bodyguard's pushing people out of the way and we walk in.

And the entire night I didn't say anything to anybody you know, people would come up and they would want to talk about the work.

And my bodyguard was like, Mr. Pecou's not taking any interviews tonight.

You know, like pushing people away.

and at the same time my friend, her name was Honey.

You know, if people came up and they wanted to talk to me, she would step up and she'd be like, yeah, what Fahamu was doing with this work is, you know...

It was an absolute joy to just kind of sit back and I just played it really cool.

Like I you know, no smile, nothing.

I didn't give people any energy at all.

The next day there was an article that came out about the show.

There was like a paragraph about the show.

And the rest of the article was about me walking around with this bodyguard and stuff.

But I shared that story because one of the people who ended up wearing the shirts was a gallery owner named Bill Bounds.

He had a gallery right across the street from my studio.

And in that neighborhood, which is called Castleberry Hill.

There were about 14 art galleries that I had gone to every single one, except for Bills', and asked them about showing my work.

Nobody would give me any energy, but I never went to Bills'.

I don't know why.

I just never went to Bills'.

But Bill you know, came in to get his shirt from my studio.

And I had my paintings lined up on the wall.

And when rain upstairs, when I came back down from upstairs with the shirt to hand to him, he was standing there like this.

He was like did you paint these?

And I said yeah, he was like, you should put these in my gallery.

And that's how my career started.

And so I always...

In that moment, I realized what Arturo had been saying to me.

- No such thing as luck.

- No such thing as luck.

You have to be prepared when your opportunity comes and you know, opportunity walked through the door and I just happened to be prepared.

And Bill is the one who, you know, launched my career.

(hip hop music) - And Fahamu's career has taken him much further than he could have ever imagined as an aspiring animator growing up in South Carolina.

He is represented by galleries in Paris and London and has work featured in private and public collections.

Including the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History.

But luckily for those of us in Chattanooga, we don't have to travel far to see Fahamu's work up close and personal.

So I'm so excited that this painting is on display now and will be part of the permanent collection at the Hunter.

Tell me a little bit about this and the title Monsters and Saints.

- Yeah, this piece is a part of a collection called Trapedemia and the title Monsters and Saints is actually derived from lyrics in a song by Atlanta rapper named Killer Mike.

In the song he talks about the ways that society can often take a child and depending on the conditions that they're raised in, depending on the way that we look at them, depending on the way we treat them, you know, turn that child into something frightening but that child could be ultimately converted back into a saint or someone who actually is a benefit to society.

You know, based on whether or not we believe in them or give them an opportunity to.

And so I wanted to...

I was really inspired by that verse and that idea.

Especially thinking about the concept of Trapademia which reimagines what we think of as the aesthetic called trap and thinking about that as a technology, more so than an aesthetic.

It's a way of survival and subverting expectations.

Surviving the traumas of the situations that we grow up in.

And so the figure here, you see it's kind of a juxtaposition between like African royalty and you know, contemporary like hip hop presentation, yeah.

- So when you're doing a piece like this, do you have a sense of who your target audience is?

Or who you hope your target audience is?

And how does the reality of who sees your pieces versus who you hope sees your pieces?

How do those intersect and how are they different?

- Yeah, I would say when I'm creating work, I'm very, very intentional and very thoughtful about you know, trying to create a narrative for young black men.

You know, just giving my own experience growing up and the types of images and ideas that were like imposed on me.

I want to create something that counters that narrative.

And then that shows other young black men who are coming up and trying to discover their way in the world, that there are multiple ways to be there.

Multiple experiences and opportunities that you can have.

So I'm very very conscious about that.

But I also realized that oftentimes that audience is not in spaces like museums and galleries.

And so I'm always trying to find ways of creating greater accessibility to my work.

So you know, where this piece is in a museum, I might create something that lives on social media that allows people to also interact and engage with that work.

And ultimately, perhaps, lead them back to this museum where they can see the work in person.

But I'm also, you know, talking to audiences that are not black or male, right?

Because at the end of the day, all of this work is about questions of identity.

And these are questions that we all have regardless of what our background is.

And so for me the idea is about sparking dialogue and creating conversations around subjects, that we may not normally feel comfortable to talk about.

(hiphop music) - Pieces like Monsters and Saints are certainly inspiring conversations that are just as critical as the work itself.

Throughout his career, Fahamu has explored both medium and marketing in new ways.

But one thing has remained constant, the transformative power of art.

(hip hop music) Everything you do feels not just important, but it feels self-reflective in a way.

As you and to come full circle a little bit, right?

As you look back at your work, as you know, the first time really confronting your own family, your own trauma.

And now, as you see yourself now, as this established worldwide, you know, artist.

What do you wish your art had done for you as a child that it's doing for you now?

- To be completely honest with you, my art has always done exactly what it's doing for me right now.

It's liberated me.

It's a safe space for me.

It's allowed me to see possibility and potential beyond what is in my physical world.

Even as a child, I think a part of the reason that I was so engulfed in art and in creating was an escape from the environment that I was in.

That was all... Like anytime you found me or saw me, I was drawing.

And even to this day it's the same thing.

It's just a larger stage now.

- You've created so many characters, ultra egos, artistic representations of you.

What do you hope the world knows about you though?

- No one has ever asked me that question before.

I would say, I hope that you know, what people get from the work that I do is hope.

That you know, just because something is a certain way doesn't mean it has to be that way.

That our potential, our possibility is more often than not greater than we can even imagine.

We just have to take the chance to risk.

To risk what we feel like is safety.

And risk what we feel as being comfortable.

And I think that's kind of been the way that I've moved in the world.

You know, I've done things that even I didn't know what I was doing.

I just started doing it, you know, and I figure it out as I go along.

But yeah, I don't know if that answers the question, but I don't really know what else to say to that.

I'm just really grateful to be able to do something that I love and be able to do it with purpose and intention and hopefully be able to you know, impact someone's life in doing so.

- Well, I think we are all grateful.

Those of us who are the recipients of that hope and of your art.

And more importantly of the conversations that it creates for the people in the communities that you are presenting.

I think that's priceless.

- Thank you.

- Thank you for being with us.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Funding for this program was provided by, - [Speaker] Chattanooga Funeral Home Crematory and Florist.

Dedicated to helping you celebrate your life or the life of a loved one for over 85 years.

Chattanooga Funeral Home believes that each funeral should be as unique and memorable as the life being honored.

- [Narrator] This program is also made possible by support from viewers like you.

Thank you.

- [Narrator] Get access to even more of the shows you love with WTCI Passport on the PBS video app.

Download it today.